


Mare Desiderii

by CorpseBrigadier



Category: Yulia - Wolf Parade (Music Video)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:14:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24067942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: Several episodes in the life of Yulia Glazkov, both following and preceding her bereavement in the aftermath of a tragic launch failure at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Relationships: Narrator/Yulia, Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5
Collections: Jukebox 2020





	Mare Desiderii

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LamiaCalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LamiaCalls/gifts).



> Based on the [music video for "Yulia"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLGs2H3gDJw) by Wolf Parade.

The stark black portrait of Vanya’s face seems to eat the color out of things, leaching the reds and blues from the domes of St. Basil’s. She wears her hair up. Her mother convinced her that it would be good to wear a scarf--it would seem more modest, less assuming. Perhaps it is only through the holes in the lace that the Red Square looks gray.

She approaches the image, weeping as freely as she feels. She tells herself that Vanya is not another Komarov. She tells herself that nothing could have been done, that there was no reason to suspect the capsule would not hold, that the mission was carried out with every care for the safety of the pilot. If the typesetters at Pravda could fix a narrative in her brain, she would let them. There is a softening in the face of the man to the left of the little stage on which an urn lies amidst lilies. He seems to react to her weeping, but he does not weep with her.

She approaches Vanya’s face: the clean-angled lines of his deep set eyes, the white nimbus of hair that in life was gold. When she kisses the image, she cannot expect it to kiss her back, but there is a finality in feeling her mouth press against the glass that takes her away from herself.

For an instant, the sky seems as blue as it was the day he left for Baikonur.

She does not sob when somebody picks her up off of her knees. When the flashbulbs go off around her and the oration begins, she feels as if she is floating.

***

_“Yulenka, Yulenka,” he says softly, touching her face. “Don’t think of me as leaving you; think of me carrying you somewhere else. Think of me saying your name up there, in some place where nobody has said anything since the beginning of time.”_

_She grips his hand tightly enough that it surely must be uncomfortable. He does not wince; he continues:_

_“I will tell the stars about you, and I will report to Zubarev that I am taking measurements of their jealousy.”_

_He moves as if to kiss her, and she playfully pushes him back._

_“You are insufferable, you know?”_

_“Think then about how the real danger is my insufferability, my little rabbit! Think about how Zubarev will tell them I’m wasting government resources!”_

_He catches her off-guard and steals his kiss. She feels herself soften as his stubble presses against her cheek._

_A low-flying plane roars over Dolgoprudnyi, and she suddenly feels as if they were suspended in water, or honey, or the thick summer air above them. It is as if time is beginning to stick, and it will take a century for their mouths to part._

***

The week is barely out when his name disappears from the papers. She sits on the sofa, blanket over her shoulders, and over the next twelve days all Seventeen Moments of Spring have passed without her registering an iota of the plot. 

Her mother tells her that she should take a walk.

She doesn’t tell her what happened the last time she took a walk, and she knows that if she were to mention it, her mother would say nothing. The old woman would refuse to register it as happening and persist in silence until it could be agreed that nothing occurred.

She walks though, and she only stops holding her breath a block down when nobody approaches. She wonders if anybody has recognized her. She wonders if anybody could? She wonders what might happen if she were to march all the way over to Cherkizovsky in broad daylight and drop herself into the pond there.

Nothing comes to pass. She meditates on how the lazy trill of cicadas has replaced so much of the birdsong of months past. It’s the sort of thing he would notice--like flowers blown early from the lindens or the scurry of a field mouse beneath the ivy. He would always point out to her all the most perfect mundanities of nature, and she would mirror the joy he found in them.

Perhaps, she thinks, kicking at a piece of litter, that sense of significance is what made him such a good scientist.

***

_She has her thumb between the pages of her diary, watching the television as she fidgets with the pen in her other hand. The cat is coiling its way around the back of the sofa, but she remains unseen. Vanya told her that she should write about the moment; she has always wanted to be a writer._

_“When you take down what you see, from the broadcast, it will be a little while after it happens for me. Still, you’ll capture the moment fresh then. When I come back, it will be as though I can see myself again: as though I am looking at a portrait of myself where the paint hasn’t yet dried.”_

_She had kissed him again then._

_“Besides, it will calm your nerves,” he’d said._

_She had kissed him more times than she could possibly recount or record._

_In the long day’s vigil, she has written near to fifteen pages. She has written until her handwriting is cramped and illegible, until her wrist is numb. There is a page about what she ate for breakfast, a page about the mail she sorted into piles on the table, a page about the radiating heat of the overcast summer’s day. She has written down her thoughts on the floor tiles and the constellations she can make out in the dirt there. She has scratched out, in tiny letters that fit two rows a line, her memories of when they first kissed and how they haunt her as she pads about the carpeted hall and stretches her arms._

_When the rocket flares and the screen before her burns to a bright silvery white, she has dropped the book. She tells herself she has to take down the moment to write it._

_She feels her forearm spasm as she prays._

***

Nearly a month has passed when she comes away from the couch and goes to sleep in what is now her bedroom. 

It is not as he left it when last he lived here. It is not as she left it the night he died. She has gone in now and again, in a very ordinary way, to fetch a shirt or a pillow. 

She has turned away each time from the window that looks out towards the river.

Tonight though, she lies there, rolling her curled body on the red and orange patterned quilt as she tries to fit herself to a place that is missing a second body. She shudders but does not cry as she recognizes how much it still smells like him: warm and clean, with the faint after note of the occasional cigarette he’d swear he hadn’t smoked. 

When Zubarev--Mikael he said he could call her---came over to hand her his posthumous gold star, he’d already vanished from everywhere else. This might be the last place in all the world to catch a residue of him: Ivan Glazkov reduced to a numinous atmosphere like the ones through which he fell.

Eventually, she forces herself to hold still--forces her eyes to remain shut. Her body is braced as if she is set to fall, and in the perfect black of that room, she cannot quite say that she won’t. When the sobs finally issue from her throat, it takes her a while to recognize the pained animal stuttering of them as something belonging to her.

She wrenches her hands to her eyes, and sees a firework of colors from somewhere behind them, blossoming into greens and blues as they burn through her vision: until she lies there, convulsively drifting in an endless expanse of nebulae and galaxies.

***

_An endless expanse of nebulae and galaxies: that’s what she thinks the water must have beneath it. Everything has gone backwards now; time is running against itself. She had entered out into the world as though it were a bubble waiting for her to pop it, and all things that glide across her vision seem unreal--paper cutouts from a fairy story. When the dogs bark after her, she thinks them toys somebody has set up for effect._

_She tries to will herself to sink, and when she bobs up the first time, she swims downward. Something ribbony in the clouded water clings to the inside of her thigh. She tries to burrow into the riverbed, to bury herself somewhere where the air and the light outside will never find her again._

_Her eyes flutter open when she takes in her first lungful of water. Her chest is burning._

_There is nothing to see here, and there is nobody to catch her. There is nothing out here at all: no lights, no voices, no warmth that she can mistake for a ghost. As she surfaces for the second time, water spilling from her mouth and nose, her eyes turn upwards towards the sun._

_It’s very warm, she thinks, even for July._

_She doesn’t take another dive, nor does she paddle back to shore. She simply drifts there for a while, letting the one star in the sky burn holes in her vision._

_As she lets herself breathe again, she imagines something within the summer air is pressing itself against her lips._

**Author's Note:**

> See my [profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/profile) for notes on remixes, podfic, derivative works, and constructive criticism.
> 
> Thanks to K for the beta!
> 
> * * *
> 
> Ivan, being a fictitious cosmonaut, dies in the midst of a fictitious explosion that would be somewhere between the Soyuz 11 crash and the successful Soyuz 12 launch. Details here and there are inspired by the aftermath of the Soyuz 1 explosion, for all that Yulia insists to herself Vanya isn't "another Komarov."


End file.
